When All Things Are Possible
by Lord Darling
Summary: In which Ariadne says goodbye to myths, Dom is a hopeless cause, skyscrapers have roots and Eames is an adult virgin.
1. Dom

Disclaimer: I don't own INCEPTION. Chapter 1: Dom.

Once, her dreams were only silly whims, backdrops for her deeper impulses. Back then, she hadn't known, the possibilities hadn't yet revealed themselves to her.

Now, possibilities are the only measures that she can think in. She's a child chasing a sunbeam down the rain-slick sidewalk in the breathless hope her feet will land on it. She's hoping, she's falling, the definites of her physical reality are just the illusions of the dreamworld, where nothing is ever for certain. She has wandered through cities of glass and steel and concrete where stairs lead to nothingness and walls bend, where skyscrapers bulge pregnant and corridors on different floors of a building can bleed into one central point. _Pure creation,_ as Dom always said, _every possibility is here, Ariadne. If you want it._ Of course Ariadne wanted it - how could anybody not, even? Here is the place where she can finally create, unshackled by the concerns of mass and density and gravity. This is the stuff that dreams are made of. Here's the place where she's both immortal and newborn, playing like a child, lying like a demon.  
The 'real' world isn't enough now. She knows the difference, isn't the kind _not_ to know, (some hard thread of rationality wired through her brain), but both worlds are indispensible now - as though it's only by virtue of the other one that each world is truly sacred, a balance struck between.  
The dreamworld makes her feel alive, but it isn't where she lives.

Dom no longer feels that way, and it's her realising of this which is the final nail in the coffin of her hope of maybe-something-more with him. Even Mal, or the Mal-thing once stalking like a spider through Dom's vulnerable mind hadn't been enough to kill her hope. She's fought before, after all. Ariadne will always fight for what she believes in. Dom is a man to believe in, because Dom is good and kind and _strong_, stronger than he'll ever know. Dom has a lifetime's wisdom in a young man's head, Dom's wild gestures and glowing blue eyes are both frighteningly and beautifully fanatical. Like her, he's a fashioner, unlike her, he's a fantasist.

She loves him a little, believes in him a lot, and he believes in her, but he doesn't believe in life any longer. She knows from the slump of his shoulders and that resigned, husky _'No, sweetheart'_ the one time she'd caught the corner of his mouth with her lips in a chancing little question, sweet and undemanding. Not Mal or mind-Mal anymore, or even guilt, but more the space where Mal was, exhausting in its ancience, filling him up and tying him down. Despite his awkward, speculative glances at her, she can't compete. Mal is more myth than woman at this point and myths never die. They set in.

Lying in her room one night, drunk and hazy with regret in that way only alcohol induces, Ariadne rifles through her book of Greek mythology. The description of Ariadne's guiding a man through the maze makes her briefly smile and trace the entry with a fingertip. It's like a nod from fate, her tunnels, towers, labyrinths a foregone conclusion, the future suddenly decided.

But it also makes her think of Dom.

She's still thinking of him several entries later when her eyes hook on 'Atlas'. She reads through the passage for the Greek titan, trailing her pencil-top over her chin. She's read them all before anyway, it's a childhood book. When she has finished reading the paragraph she doesn't even hesitate - with a steady, confident hand she prints

**DOMINIC COBB**

on the page, just above the words,

_'who carried the world on his shoulders'_.

Printed out in hard gray capitals, it's an epitaph.

Reading it back seems to finalise something somehow because as she nods to herself something tightens inside her chest, but it's only for a moment - and then it's gone.  
Finally she snaps the book shut, and with it closes other things, soft in the quiet room.

Ariadne doesn't cry, because it's just a storybook, after all. She puts it up high on a dusty, empty shelf and never opens it again.


	2. Eames

Chapter 2: Eames.

She didn't notice Eames, at first. In either sense. She didn't notice him as a possibility, a choice on the menu. Neither did she notice him at first, quite literally when, in a surprisingly understated move, he showed up in Paris, inviting himself back into her life like a breeze through an open window.

It was on a study break, sipping strawfuls of frappuchino and gazing out the window that she became aware, gradually, of a man lingering on the street against the rush of the passersby, who cast quick, significant glances every so often through the glass. Poised like a statue in a blur of movement, he stood out to any eye, but what made her lean forward in her seat with a frown of concentration wasn't the heavy slope of the shoulders or the bullishly lowered head...though they helped.

It was his nose.  
He looked away, suddenly a perfect profile and she instantly knew him by his _nose_. The sharp, perfect line of it was _Eames_.

She jumped a little. Was it a good thing she was going to be seeing Eames (and his nose) again? Inception was still sharp, both in her mind and out of it.  
Would he come all this way just to warn her? Maybe if he had no other way to contact her. Or maybe it was a job? What then? If it was, she didn't know what her own answer would be, not yet. It was too soon to tell.

But it didn't matter, because Eames had seen her seeing him and had frozen as though awaiting the signal. With a fond, instantly-adopted smile and a sweeping gesture, she beckoned him over, trying to surreptitiously clear a space on the table free of textbooks with the other arm.

He came at an ambling pace, hands shoved deep in his pockets, head bobbing to some internal beat. When he reached her table he smiled at her, pulled out a chair and sat down, heavily.

She was still a product of her years in many ways. Unable to break a weakness for films about princesses and quests, prone to hair-trigger mood switches and attacks of insecurity, growing only half-sure into her skin. Child-woman. Stood halfway between the unknowingness of childhood and the wisdom of experience, she wondered more than she knew.  
Eames, lolling casual in a chair, all tweedy huge shoulders and coy smile, surrounded by students in this babbling coffee shop - he was an anomaly. A stowaway from another world, and a world so removed from the ordinariness of her own it was actually like she was sitting opposite a Projection. Just in his being, his _breathing_ he seemed exotic.  
(Her little mental gasp, 'Wow, it's Eames!' may as well've been, 'Wow, a Bengal tiger!' or 'Wow, a penguin!')

But no, it wasn't only that. She drank him in greedily as though there really were cage bars separating them, but only part because of who and what he was. The rest was _relief_. He was okay, he was still here, and _here_ in particular, a reminder of Dom and dreams and her own daring.  
Eames, who she knew so little, already looked like Home.

"_Ariadne!_" he finally declared, as though he'd somehow seen through a disguise. Teasingly she extended a hand for him to shake, but he didn't.  
His fingers swallowed up her hand and instead he bent over it, long-lashed eyes fluttering shut as his lips pressed a kiss as light as a butterfly's wing to her knuckles. She found herself flushing at the warmth of his mouth, laughing in awkward delight.

"Y'know, a handshake probably would've been enough."

Still bent over her hand, tilting his head to consider her, Eames grinned, "In the city of love? Unthinkable! Perhaps if we bumped into each other in Merry Olde England but not _here_. Besides, I was at Wilde's grave yesterday, I want to keep up the romanticism." He cast a bemused glance at her mocha frappuchino.  
"I've never actually had one of these - I should do, shouldn't I?"

She confessed, "I kinda thought you'd be all about exotic coffees or maybe Earl Grey tea, actually."

(In her head, he's scattered, pieces which don't fit and pointedly refuse to, but all of these pieces are spiced and blended, old with travel.)

"Oh no, I _am_, I _am_," and he released her hand to fold his own primly in his lap, "but it looks so much like swamp water I'll _never_ forgive myself if I don't try it."

It startled a laugh from her, he laughed too - they sat there together laughing away like they'd known each other a lifetime.

The joy of her own pealing giggles stunned her a bit, the easiness of them together - and she suddenly realised that sometimes you don't even know how dreadfully you missed something until it's put in front of you once again.

And then you can't do without it.


End file.
